The Blue Amber Blog

How about a tragic love-story?After all, Amber and Love exist symbiotically.

Once upon a time Robert Carr, a handsome Scottish adviser on the court of King James I, fell for the charms of the beautiful Frances Howard, Countess of Essex. They were young, they were beautiful, they were in love. All was set for a fairy-tale, were it not for real-life intervening.

Real-life usually does.

Carr was known for climbing the grease-pole and the countess for her scandalous immodesties (not to mention the minor detail of still being married to some other poor klutz). A match made in heck. Many feared a disaster approaching, among them Thomas Overbury, another adviser and Carr’s best friend since childhood.

Overbury, an intelligent young poet, advised his friend not to be swayed by the countess’ beauty. He even went so far as to pen a poem, his famous “The Wife”, to explain to Carr just how a woman is to be judged, stressing quite forcefully the point that exterior appearances are deceiving.

How is this story relevant to Blue Amber?

True Beauty lies Within

One of the reasons why Dominican Amber and Blue Amber in particular are not as well known as other types of Amber is because the valuable nature of it was never quite apparent.

Although the native (now extinct) Taino Indians gave samples of it to Columbus, the Dominican Amber trade did not truly pick up until sixty or seventy years ago. That is because in its pure form Amber does not look like much at all, and since people judge beauty by the exterior as did the hapless Carr, Dominican Amber remained elusive and a collector secret for a long time.

It was different with Baltic amber where nature mined and exposed the stones for us. For centuries amber chunks have washed up along shorelines, clean and shiny. Long before Baltic amber mines came to be, the sea was already harvested of its deposits.

Dominican Amber however, when hewn out of the mountains, does not glitter or shine like gold, a metal that was already mined by the conquistadors just months after Columbus’ landfall. It doesn’t even have the dull transparency of raw diamonds, or the sky-blue hue of Larimar, another unique gem found in the DR.

In fact Dominican Amber, particularly Blue Amber, looks utterly boring and is easily confused with the strata surrounding it, unless chipped or broken up. One of our neighbors here at the ambarazul.com Amber Ranch once dug a ditch, hurling stone after stone away to get rid of them. After a moment he realized that something was wrong with the last stone he had tossed: it had been too light for its size. He went after it and discovered that the stone was a large specimen of Amber.

The experienced ambero will of course recognize the rounded lines and soft features of a glob of fossilized resin and separate it cautiously from the dirt. But even at this point it is still uncertain if the Amber lump is blue, green, yellow or, well, amber.

Going Deeper

So how can anyone tell what is underneath that thick shell of ugliness? One of Overbury’s points in the poem to his friend Carr — besides ignoring the exterior — was to look into the beauty of a woman’s soul. This applies as well to Blue Amber.

To understand the soul of Amber the amberos chip into the rock. These small ‘windows’ help grade color and quality. Based on this information the value can be estimated, as well as the extent of purity.

But is a mere peek at a corner of the stone enough? Not always. As was explained in a previous article, the blue coloration does not always extend to the entire stone. Also, the small window sometimes creates a type of optical illusion: the blue stone may look deep blue, but by the time the entire shell has been polished, the blue glow diminishes.

It is also difficult to tell if the stone has inclusions, usually dirt. If it doesn’t, then it may very well be of a yellow or amber coloration and only a blue hue under sunlight –- in itself a valuable and much sought-after variation. It can happen that a large blue piece is cut apart and looses most of its glow, since the concentration of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that cause the blue reduces.

Most collectors refuse to cut a great blue piece into smaller chunks for this very reason, keeping it in its original size but with enlarged windows. Yet often we still come across rocks so blue, they continue to keep their blue glow even after being drawn and quartered. But from the outside one would have never guessed its beautiful soul.

Like a hidden treasure or a mysterious woman, Dominican Amber haunts collectors and scientists alike. One never knows what lies beneath the layers of dirt. More than once a chunk of ugly revealed to be a deep gorgeous blue; chips of cloudy Amber revealed to contain rare insects. As with women, one has to take risks to find the truly unique gems and not be swayed by exterior appearances –- be they beautiful or ugly.

Disappointments happen, but they are seldom and never severe. Most of the time the pieces hold souls so beautiful and unique, Overbury, had he written of Amber and not women, would have been proud.

Beauty is only skin-deep… ugliness goes to the bone

So how did the love-story end? Did they live happily ever after?

Are you sure you want to know? Thomas Overbury, the wild card in this story, may have been too adamant in making his point. Some historians describe him as arrogant, which may not have helped him at all. He was determined to turn his friend Carr from the evil countess, going so far as to describing the young woman as a “filthy, base woman“. Carr, infatuated, bewitched and entirely gaga-ed, repeated this to the countess one night in her boudoir (over a game of Scrabble, I’m sure). Big mistake.

At once the scorned Lady Essex set a plot into motion to disgrace Overbury, and before long Overbury found himself dishonored and imprisoned. But the countess was still not satisfied.

Revenge — as the ancient saying goes — is a dish best served… poisoned. She called upon her evil minions and replaced the kind warden with a creature of her own and soon Overbury doubled over and died, after several painful days, in the Tower. With Overbury out of the way and Lady Essex’s previous marriage annulled they were free to wed. But what goes around comes around and eventually the murder blew sky-high and the couple were sentenced to death. After some time in the Tower both were pardoned but faded from English society. Void of both Carr and Overbury, two of his most important advisers, King James’ reign went sailing up creek.

Few remember the Overbury Affair to this day, but a detail of it has found its way into popular culture, an expression that can be traced back to Overbury’s poem ‘The Wife’: “beauty is only skin-deep.”

It is the other way around with Blue Amber: true beauty lies within.

Everyone breaks wind.

Yes, I know: a strange way to start a newsletter about amber. But bear with me unless a brief discussion about flatulence offends you. This is more relevant to amber than you’d expect.

Ed Elli Avea Del Cul Fatto Trombetta

It’s natural, it’s inevitable and it’s not just male. Unfortunately it seems to happen during the most unexpected times: the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere — one of the many rumored to be the real Shakespeare — is said to have cut one while swearing loyalty to Queen Elizabeth I (Mark Twain says it was Walter Raleigh… yeah, yeah, always blaming someone else). As the apocryphal story goes, de Vere went into self-imposed exile because of it. Maybe that’s when he wrote The Tempest.

But alas, we humans aren’t the only ones busy tossing air biscuits. Dogs and cats are just as guilty (they don’t just serve as an excuse) and so are most other mammals, including whales and even herring.

Technically speaking The Gas We Pass is not always ours: it is caused in part by symbiotic bacteria resident in our gastrointestinal tracts (blame them!), and can be a funky mixture of gases, including the greenhouse gas methane (and yes, methane is flammable, so…).

Other animals pass methane as well — so much in fact, they are partly responsible for global warming. It is a well known fact that cows and sheep share 20% of the world’s methane production, although technically it’s mostly their burping that’s responsible (this is so funny I won’t even have to crack a one-liner about it, but stopping cows from burping and farting is indeed on the Fight Global Warming to-do list).

Yet the other creature who’s flatulence is responsible for 11% of the world’s methane production is the termite.

Are we getting closer to amber, or what?

Unlike cow methane which has increased because of ranching and hence is no longer in the ‘natural production’ list, termite is natural methane. But it’s amusing to think that this tiny insect produces more gas than humans do (just how someone might measure termite and cow flatulence I’ll leave to your own imaginations, but it’s not something I would want on my resume…).

Fossilized Farts

So what, pray tell, happens when a termite is locked in resin and dies? The bacteria do not die for a while: they continue to feed (eventually on the dead animal) and pass gas. And the gas escapes any orifice it can and blows a bubble into the liquid resin.

The results are the amusing looking bubbles on the back and front ends of some insects. Yet the most notable bubble producing insects are termites, due to their high methane production. Some in fact pass so much gas once they’re dead, it’s hard to recognize them now since their whole bodies bloat and inflate out of shape. Talk about a serious gas problems.

The difference between gas-bubbles and air-bubbles in amber is the shape and texture. While air and water bubbles are usually perfectly circular and smooth, gas-bubbles vary in shape, emanate from insects and their surface is bumpy and ridged.

But what about all these other bubbles in amber?

Some Very Stale Air

Many of the bubbles in amber are either air or water or both. How the water and air got there is a matter of speculation, but it may include rain and moving sap. Dominican Amber is pegged at 20 to 30 million years old, hence the water and air inside them is from about this time frame.

Now here’s a crazy thought: could it be that it is the same air that dinos breathed? Scientist asked the same question and took a sniff. 30 million is a bit young for dinos. They had gone the way of the Dodo a long time ago. But there is older amber available, although not from the Dominican Republic.

Dino Breath

The first amber tested were samples from the late Cretaceous about 75 million years ago found in Saskatchewan.

It should be noted that the tested amber was from a time period just before the KT Boundary, or better known as the point in time when That Big Asteroid hit. Why this is relevant will not be revealed as of yet to maintain a sense of suspense.

They crushed the amber in a vacuum and analyzed the released gases with a time-resolved quadruple mass spectrometry. The results were so controversial the poor geologists who conducted these first experiments in the late eighties had to take plenty of flack for it.

Our daily air contains about 20.9% of oxygen, plus a fun amount of other gases, most of them interesting, worrisome and others just plain out scary. But the ancient air samples revealed an average of 30% oxygen and more.

Fire In the Hole

That‘s frighteningly high. Oxygen promotes combustion, in other words: the more oxygen, the easier something is set on fire. That means if the results are correct the world back then was a whole lot more fragile to fires. Then again, there were no smokers around yet, and T-Rex is known for ferocity and not pyromania.

On the other hand, it would explain how such large animals could exist in the first place. The dinos needed a lot of oxygen to maintain their immense bodies, and 30% seems to do the trick.

There is however the case for the fact that amber is reactive, meaning that it is possible that the oxygen samples are corrupted for whatever reason. 30% is an average and the 300 samples tested by USGS scientists of the Cretaceous-Tertiary periods didn’t really correlate. Some went as high as 36.6% oxygen, while others went as low as 25.5%, depending on location and age (the oldest amber tested was about 130 million years old). If that is of any meaning is hard to say, but many believe that amber is too unstable to draw any conclusions from it.

Such is the nature of science: for every theory a counter theory exists. We’re still in diapers where hard facts are concerned, since most research results are often considered circumstantial evidence.

It got more interesting when younger amber was tested and again, it should be noted that this amber was from a time period long after the KT Boundary. Again, we shall briefly maintain a sense of suspense.

How Low Can You Go?

The results were quite different than expected. The oxygen amount in younger amber held an average of 14% — lower than the today’s amount and much lower than the 30%-35% at the outset. Basically what this means is that for some reason the earth’s oxygen content drastically dropped at the KT until settling at present levels.

And now for resolving the suspense: could our amber samples show what truly killed the dinos?

They may have run out of breath. Literally. Big dinos with high metabolic rates and inefficient metabolisms could not survive in this atmosphere. They were simply too exhausted to continue to feed, hunt and even… erm… have sex.

Could it be that the amber oxygen samples indicate that instead of a giant asteroid impact, it was a severe drop in oxygen that killed all large dinosaurs?

Or maybe did the impact of said asteroid cause a giant shockwave and fireball which, fueled by the oxygen-rich atmosphere, engulfed the entire planet — which could explain why so many aquatic animals survived the KT?

Or, maybe it was the Murder on the Orient Express factor that killed them: everyone’s guilty.

Of course, the debate over what truly killed the dinosaurs is only fueled by the amber bubbles. There are dozens of theories floating about, some of them real double-takers and jaw-droppers, many with questionable veracities.

My personal favorite — and returning to the subject of flatulence — is the idea that elevated methane emissions may have killed them, caused by their own flatulency. In other words, they could have farted themselves into extinction.

This idea may seem overly far-fetched, but you will feel different about it next time you’re stuck in a crowded elevator…

If you are reading this Newsletter it’s because you know what Blue Amber is. You’ve heard of it, you’ve seen the pretty pictures we have, you may even own some or would like to.

But how many times have you seen your friends do a double-take when mentioning Blue Amber? Sure, everyone’s heard of Amber (or most people anyway, you’d be surprised). It’s a gem, it’s a color. But Blue Amber?

Such is the nature of rare gems. So this puts you in an exclusive revolutionary club, the Lovers of the Rare ( LOTR in short, not to be confused with the other jewelry-themed LOTR). But how rare is Blue Amber really, compared to all the other contenders for the title Rarest Gem in the World?

Mirror, mirror on the wall,
who is the rarest of ‘em all?

Tricky.

It’s like asking who the most beautiful woman in the world is. The answer, as is much in life, is relative (and whether you’re married or not, which I’m not, so I’m gonna go with Aishwarya Rai . And the Miss Universe contest is not helping.

It also seems to change every year. For a long time the Guinness Book of World Record (now known as the politically-correct Guinness World Records) held the Painite crystal as the rarest gem in the world. However, recent discoveries in Myanmar seem to point to further future yields.

Now more contenders have lined up, and everyone’s eager to be counted. Sugilite, Serendibite, Grandidierite, Musgravite, and a whole lot of other – ites sit in museums and private collections feeling smug about being special. Some of these gems are indeed so rare, their values can not be estimated.

And that’s a bad thing.

Gems, after all, are a business. And if a product can’t be sold, it’s pretty much useless, no matter how rare. So this limits the rare gems to those actually open for business.

Most prices for rare gems are basically adjusted according to what the seller wants to have and the buyer is willing to pay. And that depends a lot on the value the general public opinion puts on said gem.

Taaffeite and Benitoite for example are extremely rare gems and shockingly beautiful. But who’s ever heard of them? Hence their prices rarely exceed $500US to $2,000US per carat, despite the fact of being a million times rarer than diamonds.

Ah, diamonds. Don’t get me started.

Even James Bond knew: Diamonds are Forever

Too late.

I’m not afraid to say it: diamonds are the least rare gems in the world. Now, before a mob of angry housewives accuses me of romance deficiency, allow me to point out that the yearly production of gem-quality diamonds is at a whopping 130 million carats. That’s more than 20 metric tons. A lot more.

In comparison, high-grade Blue Amber has a yearly output of approximately 20 to 40 kilos, while the low-grade does not exceed 150 kilos.

I think we all hate to admit it, but each and every one of us has been brain-washed to believe that diamonds are actually something special. Those in the know (and you are now one of them) have long realized that the “A Diamond Is Forever” campaign the De Beers cartel started with the help of the N.W. Ayer & Son advertising company – the same people that brought you the When it rains it pours, Be all you can be, and Reach out and touch someone slogans – is the world’s most successful advertising campaign ever conducted for a product with zilch value. The trick was selling a concept, not a product.

Seriously though, diamonds really are forever. As in stuck with forever. Their true investment value is flimsy to nonexistent. If you own a diamond, try selling it. You won’t get much for it and with the growing synthetic diamond market the value is actually decreasing. The future doesn’t look shiny for the diamond-based ‘bling-bling’ generation. Think about that next time you shell out them hard-earned greenbacks for an engagement ring.

And if you don’t want to have a diamond, how about being a diamond? This company will take the ashes of your cremated body and make amber-colored diamonds out of it, so that your friends and family may wear you. Or grandpa. Or uncle Bob. Or your pet. Puts a whole new twist on the expression ‘family jewels’, doesn’t it? Oh yes, I can see it now:

-“Honey, that’s such a lovely engagement ring you gave me!”
-“Yes, it was my grandmother.”
-“You mean it was your grandmother…s?”
-“Uhm… No.”
-“…”

It gets better.

In late 1955 a few scientists at a GE lab transformed a glob of peanut butter into tiny diamonds. Soon pretty much any carbon-containing materials was turned into diamond grains. Gem speculators at once feared the value of natural diamonds could turn to… erm… peanuts. They were right.

So if in this day and age it is possible to make diamonds out of peanut butter, human ashes, sewer gas and even whisky (now there’s a real waste!), it comes as no surprise that synthetic diamonds outnumber natural diamonds 3 to 1. And that includes both gem-grade as well as industrial-grade. And yes, this depresses the natural diamond market.

De Beers of course fights back. These days you can’t get on an airplane without the inflight-movie commercials reminding you that diamonds come with serial numbers now. Brain-wash, brain-wash, brain-wash…

To be fair, it should be pointed out that certain colored diamond variations, called fancies, are indeed rare and valuable. The entire color spectrum is available including black and brown and even pink (Pink Panther anyone?), but the rarest is the Red Diamond priced at about $800,000US to $1.9 million US per carat. Not that there are presently any for sale.

…But Blue Amber Is Her True Love

So is Blue Amber among the world’s rarest gems? You bet it is, despite the fact that its price does not quite reflect that fact.

Just how is Blue Amber graded? There are two factors in setting prices and both fluctuate radically: availability and color.

Availability is probably the most controlling one. Since Blue Amber is only found in just one small region of the world, many outside factors influence the amount surfacing, the least of which is not rain. And nobody likes to work in a flooded mine. Also, over the past few weeks finds have been scarce. The mines have not yet run out, but the strong possibility is there.

Color is the more complicated one. We have divided Blue Amber into different variations, and still each one can vary in intensity. This makes it often difficult to please customers since we are bound by nature’s limitations.

Being this scarce, why isn’t Blue Amber more expensive? The answer is it is expensive. Compared to regular amber and its color variations it is in the highest price range, fluctuating with the market value according to the above factors.

What about it’s investment value? Unlike diamonds Blue Amber actually is an investment whose value increases over time. True, there will never be a well-known Blue Amber market in the likes of diamonds, but that is a good thing.

Doesn’t it feel good to know you love a gem so much more valuable than diamonds? Doesn’t it please you that you are now above all the brain-washing and conditioning you’ve been put through over the years?

Now everybody raise your right hand and repeat after me: Diamonds are a girl’s best friend, but Blue Amber is her True Love !

Very good. Now goose-step out there and spread the word.

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Further Reading:
We are not responsible for the content and veracity, and everything is to be taken with a grain of salt. In other words, if you end up being hunted by the Diamond Cartels, dont blame us!

Do It Yourself Diamonds: Some Basic Recipes

Diamonds out of peanut butter in your microwave…

How To Make Diamonds

Deception Point: How We Have Been Brain-Washed

The Diamond Deception (NOVA transcript)

Diamonds: an investor’s best friend?

Have you ever tried to sell a Diamond?

Why is Dominican Blue Amber blue, you ask? We have previously discussed how it became blue, but why is it blue? Are you sure you want to know?

The short answer would be that the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, produced through a thermal polymerization process initiated via irradiation, relax to their ground state and absorb high-energy ultraviolet photons and re-emit them as lower-energy visible photons, according to the absorbance curve of the particular fluorophore.

Read it again, maybe it will make more sense.

For the rest of us who just judiciously nodded their heads in aw at the deep words above, but truly in their hearts know that they understood diddly-squat (you know who you are), let’s try this again.

First, what is the overall difference between Blue Amber and Ordinary Amber?

Besides being blue, silly.

For one there is the lack of fossils. Then there is the fact that it turns blue in sunlight and several other light sources. And that it is one of the few natural materials that glow when you’re out clubbing. The term that comes to mind in this regard is fluorescence.

Shiny!

Fluorescence is the thing that turns your white shirts bright blue in the dance club.

White shirts are made white with optical brighteners, which are dyes that suck up the invisible ultraviolet light and bounce it back as visible light. These dyes are used in pretty much everything that has to be a bright color, but it is more commonly used for anything white, including ordinary paper and even toilet paper (don’t ask me what the point is in that). Not, however, in money. Real money is not supposed to glow blue except in designated areas.

Most of these dyes are synthesized from plants. Plants, as we all know since first grade, are photosensitive. It is possible to derive certain elements from them that are fluorescent, such as stilbene and umbelliferone.

There are many uses for chemicals that make things bright and shiny. Umbelliferone for example is synthesized from coriander and even carrots and besides serving as a dye it is also used in sunscreen lotions. Stilbene is even used in laundry detergents — not to make your clothes cleaner or softer, but to dye them brighter. Kind of cheating, isn’t it?

Yes, but how exactly does the dye do it? How do these “fluorescent elements” become all bright and shiny? And how is this relevant to Amber?

Glowy, shiny things are everywhere nowadays. Watches, lamps, LCD screens, laptops, and even your iPod have some form of glow chemicals involved. Let’s turn to what is probably the most famous fluorescent light in our households: the common fluorescent tube. It’s cheap, it’s efficient and it makes us all uglier (seriously — it’s the worst kind of mirror-lighting around).

What’s In The Tube

Inside the glass tube is a partial vacuum and a tiny amount of mercury. An electric discharge causes the mercury to emit invisible ultraviolet light (which is actually harmful to living organisms — I’m just sayin’). The tube is powdered with a coating of phosphor – the fluorescent element.

Phosphor can be made out of many materials such as zinc, aluminum, oxides, to name a few, but the first discovery of it was in 1669 by German alchemist Henning Brand when he boiled down 5,500 liters of urine and it started to glow (beer was already popular, so…). He was trying to produce silver — yes, out of urine — but what he got was a glow-in-the-dark element similar to the one we use today in lamps (that’s right: all CSI fans know that urine glows in the dark).

The process in Blue Amber is surprisingly similar to phosphor (except no beer involved). The difference between fluorescence and phosphorescence is basically only the amount of time that the glowing element glows.

Let There Be Light

In order to understand the fluorescent effect in phosphor, Blue Amber or the above optical brighteners, we have to understand light.

The truth is we don’t know what light is.

We have neat little theories working on the problem, for theories rush in where Angels fear to tread. Yet the only thing scientists agree about is that we probably don’t know the half of it and that our theories are but superficial explanations for a process so complex we might burn up a few hundred grants before ever figuring it out.

So what about them light particles we hear so much about?

We know that there is probably a form of energy that is released by atoms when the electrons that orbit them get excited.

What about?

Good question. It seems that electrons are just tickled pink when something passes energy to their atom – ultraviolet particles for example – and they jump to a higher orbit around their atom and back down, getting rid of that extra energy along the way.

Blue Amber

Let’s tally up what we know so far.

Certain natural elements (plants, etc) have molecules whose atoms suck up invisible light and make it visible.

The connection is there. Fluorescence occurs naturally and Amber as we know it is also plant derived, so to speak. Would this then mean that the Amber trees contained elements that were fluorescent?

Looks that way.

At least Dominican Amber. Under a banker’s UV light Dominican Amber becomes a light milky blue — Baltic Amber doesn’t (one interesting way to keep them apart).

However, Blue Amber is the only Amber that is fluorescent even under daylight. So the fluorescent molecules in Blue Amber are of a higher saturation than in Ordinary Amber.

How on earth did they get there?

Again, we don’t know.

But — you guessed it — we got a neat little theory on that.

Anthracene Hypothesis

Let’s remember where Amber comes from: trees. The resin becomes Amber, but what becomes of the rest of the organic material from that tree? It undergoes a similar process as Amber and becomes Coal.

Which is why people digging for coal often find Amber, and people digging for Amber often find coal.

We know that from the incomplete combustion of coal and wood and pretty much any other sort of fire, we can get polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Although Blue Amber, when polished, smells different than Ordinary Amber, the term ‘aromatic’ may be misleading: in this case it has nothing to do with odor, referring instead to the hydrocarbon’s chemical properties.

One well known hydrocarbon that is fluorescent is anthracene. It is used in the artificial production of dye, wood preservatives, insecticides, and coating materials and rats don’t like it. It is entirely colorless but glows blue under ultraviolet light, and if the anthracene contains traces of naphtacene, then the fluorescent glow may be more green than blue.

So is there anthracene in Blue Amber?

The magic words from above are “incomplete combustion,” meaning it takes a fire to produce these fluorescent molecules. Previously we have established that Blue Amber may be the result of a fire, giving possible ash residue as evidence.

And where there’s fire, there’s anthracene.

However, recent studies by Vittorio Bellania and Enrico Giulotto at the University of Pavia, Italy paint a clearer picture. They studied several amber specimens via means of optical absorption, fluorescence spectroscopy, and time-resolved fluorescence measurements. The resulting spectral analysis revealed that the spectra of the hydrocarbons are very similar in shape to those of diluted solutions of anthracene, perylene, and tetracene, but it is the perylene that get’s the cigar. Its emission occurs nearly exactly in the same spectral range of blue amber, indicating that the fluorecent hydrocarbon responsible for the blueness is most likely perylene.

Don’t believe me? Get one of our beautiful Blue Amber pieces and go clubbing, or simply step into the sun if you please…

“A huge lizard!”

One of the diggers had just brought a new specimen from the mine and he was glowing. You don’t see a dirt-weary ambero glowing like that every day unless he’s in love, drunk or truly found something special.

The piece did look interesting, yet strangely warped for a lizard. Too transparent. No distinguishable legs. No skeleton. So the piece got polished.

No, this wasn’t a lizard. We didn’t know what it was, except for a few odd hexagonal cells that were way to exact to be there just by chance. What objects in nature have hexagonal cells?

The most obvious assumption is of course that they are honeycombs. However, there are a few problems with this conjecture. The Western Honeybee (apis mellifera) — the bee as we know it — is not native to the American continent. It was first introduced to South America approximately 500 years ago. The hexagonal enclosures in piece of amber from La Toca mine however date back 35 - 40 million years (J.A. Santiago-Blay and G.O.Poinar jr). What gives?

ROYAL LADY

The honeybee may still have buzzed about Europe and Africa when the Amber was still resin, but another species of bee did exist and it is the Mayan culture that reminds us of this.

The Mayans were the first to actually keep bees as pets and harvest the honey, calling them Xunan Kab, the Royal Lady. The bee species they kept is now identified as a type of stingless honeybee (Melipona beecheii but also Melipona yucatanica) that differs from the traditional Western Honeybee in the fact that is does not, well, sting.

It does however bite and it doesn’t build hives the way western bees do. Instead Xunan Kab builds pots irregularly arranged around a central brood comb where the larval bees are housed. The pots may be circular, but it is the brood comb that is hexagonal.

Since Hispaniola and the South American continent used to be connected, could our specimen indeed be a brood comb of a great-great-great-grandfather of the Xunan Kab?

Maybe, if it weren’t for the other insect that builds hexagonal nests and resides within the Apis family.

WASP

Wasp nests look shockingly similar to our hexagonal cells, plus they have the advantage of having been previously identified in Miocene Amber as a new species of the paper wasp genus Agelaia Lepeletier (Hymenoptera: Vespidae; Polistinae, Epiponini). At least three other finds of similar kinds have been studied and identified.

Some Agelaia species also have the habit of building their nests in fallen tree trunks near ground level, which would be a perfect location for resin to accumulate.

Unlike bees, wasps build their nests of paper, not wax. Unfortunately it is hard to identify the former consistency of a material after it has become a rock. Opinions seem to split in this regard. Some feel that our specimen appears to be more paper than wax, while others are of the opinion that it is more wax than paper.

Whipping out Occam’s Razor, one could postulate that the find is indeed wasp, not bee. But Occam’s Razor is a double-bladed sword, and at this point a comparative study on those cells, including measurements, shape of the cells and their composition is needed.

And to fuddle up the issue a bit more, here come Larry, Curly and Moe.

THE THREE STOOGES

Not far from the main hexagonal complex we find three unidentified larvae. The first logical assumption would be to state that they may be bee pupae, swept out of their brood comb by the gushing resin. Experts we have consulted (among them the world’s leading Amber expert George Poinar) disagree among each other in matters of the origin of the hexagonal shapes, but they all seem to be in accordance in the point that the larvae are not pupae of any kind, but most likely scavenger, inquilines, or even some parasitoid type of larvae (a wax moth larvae?).

The thing is, most insect larvae pretty much look the same. Some may have anterior true legs or pseudolegs, which could indicate wax moth larvae for instance. But here is another problem we face: Larry and Curly both look to be legless, while Moe seems to have some type of legs.

In any case, they seem not to help in identifying the hexagonal cells, since scavenger larvae are popular in all types of nests, be they honeybee, stingless bee or wasp.

The nature of this specimen is still heavily debated and requires further study. Without any doubt, it is a rare fossil of hexagonal cells and could be an interesting scientific study object, especially for a museum or any other specialized institution.

(The piece is currently part of the private
Amber Ranch Collection)

_________________________________

Some further reading:

Camargo, J. M. F., J. S. Moure & D. W. Roubik, 1988. Melipona yucatanica , New Species (Hymenoptera, Apidae, Meliponinae): Stingless Bee Dispersal Across the Caribbean Arc and Post- Eocene Vicariance. Pan-Pac. Ent., 64(2): 147-157.

Carpenter, J.M., and Grimaldi, D.A., 1997. Social Wasps in Amber. Am. Mus. Novitates 3203 : 7pp., 4 figs.

There’s a Sucker Born Every Minute

Indeed. The fantastic world of forgers, frauds, hoaxes and shenanigans. What would this world be without them?

If it had not been for a hoax or forgery Idaho would not have its name, the Republican Party no elephant, Loch Ness no monster, creationists no Piltdown Man, and, ah yes, some factions within the amber community would have no business at all.

Just what is forgery? And what on earth is a ‘shenanigan’?

Often interpretation is based purely on legal clarification and/or point of view. For example: is the Baltic habit to finagle with amber forgery or just reconstruction? Is peddling copal as amber a hoax? To many the answer to either questions is obvious, but if we take a step back then arguments can be found to defend copal as amber (“It’s just younger!”) and demonstrate that Baltic amber is much prettier once ‘cooked’.

Sometimes however, a hoax is as obvious as the time when this guy wrote a bestseller about da Vinci and everybody thought it was based on facts.

That is to say, not everyone gets it at first.

It takes a few stumbles, but eventually we all learn to keep our eyes open and learn to separate truth from fiction. Or, to put it in terms we amber folks can dig: know the difference between Dominican amber and Shenanigans – Shenanigans being a Gaelic word for what the Very Nasty Dominican Amber Forger Boys do.

Amberos

Last week it happened again. Two ‘amberos’ put-putted on their scooter up to our offices and submitted a lovely fist-sized piece of blue amber. As per custom it was still covered in the dirt straight from the mine with only a thumbnail-sized window chipped into it revealing what looked like a purplish blue. The fact that the dirt on the rest of the chunk could not be persuaded to be removed was a dead giveaway. A deep look at the amberos revealed but furtive innocence. This clump was quite obviously a phony. We warned them that if the piece was a fake, we would never buy from them again. Both amberos insisted that this was not the case, this is a real one, how dare you to suggest, what with my honor, blablabla. You could hear their fingers click as they crossed.

Our polisher at first agreed with the amberos: a very nice piece. Then he tried to enlargen the window so we could see deeper into the piece. As he started on the grinding wheel he noticed an odd smell. And then chink! went the blue amber ‘window’ as it took its leave from the rest of the piece. The whole lump was cheap yellowish/brownish amber and the dirt and blue amber ‘window’ had been glued on: the Coqui Case.

The Case of the Sticky Frog

The most common question about fake Dominican amber we get here is concerning copal. eBay is awash in it, some of it claiming Dominican citizenship, and we know that Colombian copal is being sold as Baltic amber. But the truth is that copal posing as amber is the least of our worries. The biggest problem we have with phony amber is the Coqui Case.

Coqui is the name of a superglue brand in Puerto Rico, which took it from its national symbol of a sticky frog (no pun intended) that likes to climb up walls and rain on unsuspecting tourists. The brand name stuck (okay, pun intended).

Since it dries to a rock-like consistency it is used by sneaky amberos to coqui blue amber chips to ordinary amber. Sometimes larger pieces of amber that broke apart during mining are coqui -ed back together and polished until the crack is nearly invisible and covered with dirt.

Another blue amber trick is chipping a window into a possible blue amber candidate to see if blue comes visible. If it doesn’t, then a different side is chipped, so long until a blue side is found. The other none-blue windows are then covered up with dirt and coqui. This piece then looks like a blue amber piece because one side happens to be blue. Upon polishing, however, it proves to be ordinary amber.

The Case of the Lost Impostor

Another aspect is the act of sneaking a cheapy in with the good stuff. An old peddlers trick and you got to be aware of it. A scruffy yellow amber may at times be added to a stash of blue amber, or a few pieces with nothing but dirt as enclosures may be shoved in with the good enclosures in the hopes that the buyer will not notice it. And when the keen buyer does, then the reaction is either “oh dear, how did that get there?” or a head-on, in-your-face denial, come hell or high water this is a real enclosure, see, see? That’s a bug! — As if the power of suggestion was enough to convince us.

Since Dominican amber is found in different mines, the quality varies. The really good stuff comes from only three or four mines out of the dozen or so available. The difference lies in transparency, color and size, even shape, and ultimately price. For those uninitiated it is easy to mistaken Dominican amber for Dominican amber. Understandably.

It takes a trained eye — better yet, two — to separate a batch of raw pieces. Again the Nasty Amber Boys will mix the mines of origin to suit their needs and claim a single provenance for a higher price. They even cover the cheaper pieces with dirt from the good mines, so it looks as if it came from the good mine. Blue amber for example from the Bayaguana / Sabana area will look wonderfully blue or purple, but after a few months in the fresh air loose the blue coloration and become boring blond.

Very unsporting.

The Case of the Necklace

We have been talking about the raw material so far, but what about jewelry? Is it possible to fake it?

Dominican amber, like the Baltic, can be enhanced. Much Baltic amber for example is liquefied (cleared, autoclaved) and later supplemented with coloration and looks like a cup of tea with a few drops of blue ink — a far cry from the luminescent blue of Dominican blue amber. But the Dominican Amber Forger Boys have not yet reached this artistic level of cooking it in hot paraffin or glycerin and then pressing it into shape or any other form of reconstruction. So far the only minor enhancements done to jewelry, besides the same sly-hand tricks mentioned above with the raw material, are at times esthetical.

For example a yellow cabochon can be given a red hint by painting its back side with a marker before it is set in its silver frame.

Instant Gratification

There is just something about facing an ambero when you know you are dealing with a shenanigan: the flapping puppy-dog eyes, the sinless shadows, that immaculate smile that seems to say “Who? Meeeee?” while they shove the bogus bagatelle in your face and speak of honor and respect. Any decent Klingon would have had their heart on a platter.

I can only attribute the will to sell the piece anyhow to the Philosophy of Instant Gratification: better to have a stack of nice bills for that trinket now and who cares about the future anyway.

It only remains to be said that fortunately the real bad Faker Boys amount to only a handful. But it is those few that can hurt business. Some are head-on dishonest, some just sneaky and some just plain clumsy. Some are so good that even honest amberos with a lot of experience have been fooled. Also, a vast gray zone exists for some who are just a little bit dishonest if an opportunity calls for it. Nevertheless, over the years a natural honesty has worked its way into the Dominican amber community, since honesty breeds repeat business, and repeat business bestows moolah. Thus, a cheating ambero will emerge and try his stick to peddle some cow hokey, but will eventually be outed by fair amberos with the result of having trouble breaking back into the straight business. This does not protect us run-of-the-mill buyers from forgery, but it does help in limiting pitfalls.

Atlas Shrugged Off

It’s a different story on “Teh Internets”. Here knavery is elevated to an art form and the 1rst Amendment is live ammunition. Dot Communism is the opiate of the people. The underlying business philosophy for many seems to be not so much ‘open source’, but rather an objectivistic rational egoism along the lines of ‘every man for himself’. Ayn Rand would be proud.

Sources such as eBay being flooded with cheap amber shows just how far some people will go to dip into the amber business and sell ‘cooked’ pieces or copal as pure amber, be it from the Baltic, Colombia, Dominican Republic or, for all we know, MiddleEarth.

The best way to protect your self from shams is doing research before buying a shady piece on eBay and/or relying on known and trusted suppliers. Online groups of amber experts such as the fossilamber group can also help in identifying real amber, as well as the enclosures therein. And Blue Amber? Let me just take this as an opportunity to plug ambarazul.com, the world’s leading Blue Amber supplier.

Seriously though, we got some nice pieces.

All right. Enough horn-blowing.

Have you seen this movie about DNA in amber that could recreate Dinosaurs, so they could break loose and feast on skeptics? You may have heard of it. No way to measure the age of DNA?

Indeed there is. It’s called Amino Acid Racemization (AAR) and it’s not as bad as it sounds.

As stated previously, there is a good chance that proteins can still be found in amber bugs.

Amino acids are in a certain orientation while part of a living organism (right-handed, they call it) and will flip over when the organism is dead (to the left-hand orientation).

Except nobody really calls it ‘flipping.’ The proper term is ‘racemization’, although I think ‘flipping’ is cooler, so let’s stick with it.

This flipping takes time and it’s the ratio from flipped to unflipped that can give an indication of the age.

Generally AAR-ing can measure around 500 million years into the past and stay fairly accurate, but it does get a bit tricky with amber.

More recent studies show that chances to find amino acids (and ergo DNA) that survived unharmed inside amber are Slim to None.

And Slim just left town.

Citations:

Proc R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 1997 Apr 22;264(1381):467-74

Amino acid racemization and the preservation of ancient DNA.

Austin JJ, Ross AJ, Smith AB, Fortey RA, Thomas RH.

Department of Palaeontology, Natural History Museum, London, UK. Abstract
Apparently ancient DNA has been reported from amber-preserved insects many millions of years old. Rigorous attempts to reproduce these DNA sequences from amber- and copal-preserved bees and flies have failed to detect any authentic ancient insect DNA. Lack of reproducibility suggests that DNA does not survive over millions of years even in amber, the most promising of fossil environments.

Bugs, feathers, plants and lizards.

Plenty of them doing time in amber.

Obviously they can fit into a respective evolutionary pattern, which then should correlate to a certain time period in the long history of earthly evolution.

Except they don’t.

Trying to fit amber inclusions into the evolutionary pattern has become a game of hammering the peg into the preconceived hole: sometimes they fit just perfectly, sometimes they don’t, sometimes we have to cheat. And sometimes the peg is square and the hole is round and you have to hit hard to make it fit.

Really hard.

As an example serves our good friend, the anole, a.k.a. gecko, a.k.a. lizard, a.k.a. That Little Green Thing That Just Crawled Over My Foot.

You can’t go to a Caribbean island without coming across one of these adorable tiny lizards, and when amber was still a sticky goo dripping from the trees, they were already out and about.

It is interesting, if unnerving, to note that the million-year old anoles found in amber seem to stem from the same family as the ones alive today – as if the lizard in the amber was enclosed just last year.

This sort of takes all the fun out of evolution because it would mean that anoles did not evolve at all over the past 30 to 15 million years, while in the same time-frame humans managed to climb down from the trees, shed fur, walk upright, use tools, invent wars, Hotdogs, New York and the Super Bowl. Apparently anoles just sat around and watched.

Let’s do some hammering. The most logical explanation we have for this discrepancy is that evolution works in intervals – short bursts of evolving that last a few million years or less and then nothing for a few epochs. Once the burst is over the species establishes itself and sticks around for a while without changing. Further evolving may be possible after that, but it hasn’t happened yet.

The other explanation is shorter, and some people start rolling their eyeballs when you bring it up — you know what I mean.

There’s a law, and it’s the Law of Superposition.

It basically states that the deeper a deposit, the older it is, the shallower the deposit the younger it is.

It’s a great way to date rocks and its logic as heck.

It’s a law and geologists get very grumpy when someone dares to speak against it.

But then there is the issue of redeposition.

The reason why Dominican amber is often found in different strata may be because it moves around a lot.

Ergo, this could mean that amber did not become amber in its current location, but got moved there a long time ago, which could mean it is even older than we think.

Numbers proposed range anywhere in between the Cretaceous (Brouwer and Brouwer, 1982) to pre-Lower Miocene period (Baroni-Urbani and Saunders, 1982) — meaning about 100 million years ago and less (the approximate time of the dinosaurs, which should make Jurassic Park fans very happy).

This theory is often refuted because little amber, if any, is ever found in rock formations known to be from the Mesozoic Era (it has been found, but not enough to validate an argument).

Still, redeposition is not out of the question and needs further examination.

It doesn’t exactly break the Law of Superposition, but it doesn’t support it either.

Just makes it all fuzzy.

You know, sometimes I get the impression Momma Earth does this on purpose to make things hard on us.

Dating amber alone is risky – always bring a chaperon.

In this case the strata and rocks in which amber is found.

Anyone familiar with the previous newsletter will remember that amber was deposited in dirt and sand at the bottom of lagoons as copal.

Hence this dirt and sand is organic rich and contains forms of microfossils – fish teeth, oysters, corals, mollusks, tiny crustaceans – that can help in verifying the age.

And it is thanks to much of these microfossils that we say 20 million years, the Early Miocene period, independent from the amber.

And, yes, you guessed it: there is yet another problem.

The dirt in which amber is found differs from site to site all over the island.

Generally we are dealing with clastic sedimentary rocks composed largely of quartz with other common minerals including feldspars, amphiboles, clay minerals, and sometimes more exotic igneous and metamorphic minerals such as slate, schist or gneiss.

But exactly that causes difficulties because sometimes there aren’t any or not enough microfossils to go by and the different rocks and minerals are from time periods older or younger than previously assumed.

That makes correct dating a real stumper.

Schist happens.